The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, criticized the new restrictions on asylum at the border announced by the Administration of President Joe Biden, assuring that they will do nothing to reduce irregular crossings.

The measures, which came into effect this Wednesday morning, “do not change anything with respect to the chaos that Biden created on the border,” the Republican said in an interview with Fox News.

As of today, most people subject to detention crossing irregularly to the United States will be considered “unfit” to seek asylum, except in some exceptional cases or that meet stricter standards to apply to other types of protections.

The restrictions, harshly criticized by human rights groups, will only be lifted when irregular crossings drop from more than 2,500 to an average of 1,500 a day, a figure that has not been recorded since 2020.

Abbott, a close ally of former President Donald Trump and a pioneer in anti-immigrant measures in the United States, assured that what the restrictions will do is increase the number of people crossing without being detected by the authorities.

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“It will attract more people to come to our country illegally; there are people who cross every day who do not want to ask for asylum, who are criminals, rapists, murderers,” he said in the interview.

To apply for asylum in the United States, the law stipulates that a person must already be in U.S. territory.

In 2023, the Biden government imposed a dating system, through a mobile application called CBP One, which limits the number of people who can show up each day at the ports of entry to ask for this protection. Throughout the border, which spans more than 3,139 kilometers, there are only 1,450 daily appointments available.

Desperate and in the face of the dangers of staying in Mexico, where they are subject to the violence of cartels and insecurity, many migrants decide to cross irregularly into the United States to surrender to the US authorities.

The new restrictions seek to prevent most of these people from seeking asylum and being quickly deported to their countries of origin or to Mexico if they are Mexican, Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian or Nicaraguan.

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However, it remains to be seen how the Government manages to enforce the new orders, since it has a limited capacity both to keep people in detention centers for migrants and to carry out deportation flights.

Hundreds of thousands of people have arrived so far this year at the southern border of the United States, the world’s first economy, in search of better opportunities and fleeing deep social and political crises in countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua or Haiti.

The entire American continent is registering high numbers of people movement, with more than 21 million currently displaced, according to data from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).